Essential oils & personal care
Butterfly pea flower
Butterfly pea, telang, gives one of the few natural blue colours available to food and drink. The colour shifts to purple and pink as acidity increases, which is either the selling point or the problem. Whether it may be used as a colourant depends on your market.
How it leaves the country.
- Whole dried flowers
- The main trade. Sold for infusion, tea blends and as a visible ingredient.
- Cut and sifted
- For tea bags and blending, specified by cut size.
- Powder
- Milled flower, used where the plant material itself goes into the product.
- Extract
- Concentrated colour, standardised on anthocyanin content. A different regulatory question from the dried flower.
How it is graded.
Bought on colour intensity and on how clean the drying was. The blue is anthocyanin and anthocyanin degrades, which is what most of the specification protects against.
- Colour intensity
- Deep blue infusion. Weak colour means poor drying, age or flowers picked at the wrong stage.
- Anthocyanin content
- For extract, the standardised figure a formulator doses against. For dried flowers it is usually assessed by infusion.
- Moisture
- Flowers are delicate and moisture causes both mould and colour loss over a long voyage.
- Whole flower integrity
- Where the flower is visible in the product, broken flowers are a downgrade. For extraction it does not matter.
- Microbiological load
- A dried flower for infusion. The count and how it was reduced belong in the specification.
- Pesticide residues
- Often grown as a smallholder crop or a hedge plant. Residue testing on the shipped lot is worth doing.
How it is packed.
- Light and bulky
- Whole dried flowers take enormous volume for very little weight. Freight per kilo is high and compression damages the flowers.
- Barrier and light
- Anthocyanin degrades with light and heat. Opaque packaging and a cool stow both matter.
- Cartons rather than bags
- Flowers crush. Cartons with liners protect the form that buyers are paying for.
- Ambient
- Shelf stable dry, and colour fades steadily in a hot container over several weeks.
Where it grows.
West Java
Java
Cultivation and drying with processing close to Jakarta and the port.
Central Java
Java
Smallholder growing with drying capacity serving the herbal trade.
Bali
Bali
Smaller volumes oriented to premium tea and wellness buyers.
Documentation, where applicable.
- Phytosanitary certificate
- A dried plant product, so plant health applies and treatment may be required.1
- Certificate of analysis
- Moisture, microbiology, pesticide residues and, for extract, the standardised colour figure.
- Organic certificate
- Available from certified growers, and the certifier has to be one your market accepts.2
- Certificate of origin
- Which form applies depends on the destination and the preference scheme in force with Indonesia.
Questions buyers ask.
Can I use it as a food colouring?
That depends entirely on your market. Some jurisdictions treat a colouring extract differently from a dried botanical used as an ingredient, and authorisation may be needed. Establish it before building a product around the colour.
Why did the blue turn pink?
Acidity. The anthocyanin shifts colour as pH falls, so adding lemon turns it purple then pink. In a drink that is a feature and in a formulation with fixed acidity it is a constraint.
How stable is the colour?
Less stable than a synthetic. Light, heat and pH all move it, which is why packaging and formulation matter more here than with most natural ingredients.
What does your service cost?
Five per cent of the order value, paid by you and never by the factory. A factory audit starts at $250 depending on location. We work with orders from $10,000 per shipment.
Tell us what you need.
Give us the specification and the destination port. We come back with producer options and an indicative price. Our fee is 5 % of the order value, paid by you and never by the factory.
Sources
- 1Badan Karantina Indonesia, the national quarantine agency. Republic of Indonesia. Checked 3 August 2026.
- 2Regulation (EU) 2018/848 on organic production and labelling. EUR-Lex. Checked 3 August 2026.